Joan Bennett and Ted Kennedy were married on Nov. 29, 1958, in St. Joseph`s Roman Catholic Church in Bronxville, N.Y. All the Kennedys were there --``and there were lots of them,`` Joan told me with a laugh. ``I had no idea what I was getting into. I was just a nice young girl marrying a nice young man.`` The fashionable ceremony was performed under floodlights and recorded on film, an appropriate symbol to mark the beginning of the years of Joan`s life in which every public act, every private pain, would be held up for scrutiny. It was also the beginning of giving in to Kennedy wishes. Joan wanted to be married by John Cavanaugh, the president of Notre Dame, but Ted`s family insisted that the young couple be married by Francis Cardinal Spellman. I always loved listening to Joan when she relived the early years of her marriage, and I could compare her memories to my own recollections of the glamor and excitement of the Kennedys` reign in Camelot. ``The first five years were the happy ones,`` she said. After Jack Kennedy`s election, she and Ted briefly considered moving out West, away from the Kennedy name and influence. But the family had other plans for Ted, and instead the couple moved to Boston, where he became an assistant district attorney for a dollar a year. Meanwhile, a Kennedy friend was appointed to fill Jack`s vacant Senate seat until Ted became old enough to make a bid for it.

In 1962, Ted became one of the youngest senators in history and Joan one of the youngest Senate wives. They immediately moved children and staff from Boston to a large and beautiful house in Georgetown. And so Ted`s political career began while his brother Jack was president and his brother Bobby was attorney general. ``It was really a big time,`` Joan said with a note of awe in her voice, as if she found it hard to believe herself.

Beneath the sparkling surface of their lives, however, darker currents began to swirl.

She was overwhelmed by the Kennedy way of doing things. ``The house was always full of cooks, baby nurses and staff,`` she told me. ``I felt extra, no good. When I said I didn`t want a baby nurse, we had a baby nurse. Everything was done and taken care of and I didn`t do it. I was nobody, nothing, not needed.``

Then there were her obligations as a Kennedy, and the inevitable comparisons that Joan made between herself and the other Kennedy women: First of all, Rose, the matriarch of the clan, whom Joan described as a ``saint.``

``I never heard her complain about anything. And I was supposed to do the same thing.`` Jackie, the ethereal First Lady, Joan considered the epitome of sophistication. And Ethel, the epitome of motherhood. Finally, there were the Kennedy sisters: smart, committed, accomplished. ``I just couldn`t keep up,`` Joan told me. ``I can remember thinking the Kennedys are so good at everything, and I`m a flop.``

A volley of rifle fire in Dallas on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, ended the life of Jack Kennedy, and became for Joan the first of many disasters that would eventually shatter her own seemingly secure existence.

Ted was in the Senate and Joan was having her hair done at Elizabeth Arden`s salon when word burst forth on the wire services around the world that the president had been shot. Attendants at the salon tried to prevent Joan from hearing the news on the radio until Milton Gwirtzman, Ted`s legislative assistant, could pick her up. Gwirtzman drove her home, where Ted was waiting for her and trying unsuccessfully to get through to his brother Bobby at the White House. When they learned that the president was dead, Ted and Eunice

(Kennedy Shriver) flew to Hyannis Port to be with their parents.

Joan was left in Washington, where that evening she had planned a dinner party to celebrate her fifth wedding anniversary. With Ted gone, she turned to her own family for consolation. Her sister Candy and Candy`s husband, Robert McMurrey, came to the party and stayed with her through that terrible weekend while the rest of the Kennedys grieved in Hyannis Port. It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that she was excluded from the inner circle. Unlike the other Kennedy women, who were able to withstand the shock and grief, Joan went into seclusion in her bedroom for several days, overcome with sadness.

In 1964, Ted ran for Senate re-election. Joan was once more plunged into the demands of the political campaign. Then tragedy struck again.

Defying bad weather, Ted was flying to Springfield on June 19 to accept renomination at the Massachusetts State Democratic Convention when his small plane crashed and two passengers were killed. Narrowly escaping death himself, Ted was rushed to the hospital with a punctured lung and a broken back. Joan rose to the challenge, and for the next several months while Ted remained in a hospital bed, she helped run his election campaign by traveling all over Massachusetts, speaking for Ted and shaking thousands of hands. It was probably her finest hour as a Kennedy.